Hospital Horrors: Imagine Your Amputated Foot as a Pillow

Out of all the things we wouldn't want to use as a pillow, our own recently-amputated foot is pretty much the top of that list. Yet somehow, a hospital in India seemed to think it a fine idea for one of their patients.

A man in Ghansham, India, was recently involved in a bus crash that resulted in doctors amputating his foot. But instead of disposing of said foot, staff apparently thought it more appropriate to prop it behind the man’s head as a makeshift pillow, according to SWNS.

Warning: These photos are graphic.

SWNS

SWNS

Horror-struck, the man’s family reportedly tried to get doctors to remove the foot. It wasn’t until a relative went to a local market to buy a pillow that the amputated foot was finally removed from behind his neck.

Listen, hospitals are generally great. They cure diseases! They save people's lives! But nevertheless, they sometimes get it wrong. In some unfortunate cases, slip-ups that seem more worthy of bad daytime television have become real patients' living nightmare.

Here are six more examples of cringeworthy hospital mishaps.

Doctors Amputate the Wrong Testicle

Imagine having your testicle removed — and then finding out doctors removed the wrong one. That nightmare was a reality for Air Force veteran Benjamin Houghton, who went in for surgery to have a testicle potentially containing cancer removed, only to discover doctors had mistakenly taken out his healthy testicle, instead.

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Woman Wakes up During Surgery — But Is Paralyzed

Sometimes, general anesthesia doesn't work the way it's supposed to. Canadian Donna Penner went in for a routine abdominal surgery — and woke up just as doctors started cutting into her body. While her mind was wide awake, her body remained completely paralyzed, meaning she felt all the pain of doctors cutting into her stomach, but was unable to signal that she was awake.

Anesthetic awareness, or waking up while under anesthesia, reportedly happens to 1 out of 19,000 surgical patients in the United States.

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Doctors Operate on Wrong Ankle

Ravi Rai, 24, broke his right ankle falling down a flight of stairs and needed surgery. But when his parents were able to see him post-surgery, they noticed their son's healthy, left ankle was covered in bandages, while his broken right ankle remained untouched, according to the Hindustan Times. Five hospital staffers were eventually fired for the botched surgery.

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Doctors Leave Surgical Sponge Inside Man’s Stomach

Doctors couldn’t figure out why Nelson Bailey kept coming back after his surgery complaining of severe stomach pain. After all, the surgery was supposed to help with his digestive disease.

Five months later, they put him back under the knife to figure out what was wrong — and what they found was a 12-inch by 12-inch surgical sponge in his abdominal cavity, left inside by surgeons from the first surgery. The sponge had begun rotting inside of Bailey’s stomach, causing holes to form inside his intestines.

According to Today, as many as 1,500 people who go under the knife each year in the United States have surgical objects left inside them by accident.

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Woman Inseminated With Wrong Sperm

When Nancy and Thomas Andrews had trouble getting pregnant, they decided to turn to in-vitro fertilization treatment for help. Nancy soon became pregnant, and nine months later, their daughter was born — only her skin was darker than either of theirs. It turns out Nancy was inseminated with the wrong sperm due to a mix-up at the reproductive clinic.

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Man Dies After Being Sucked Into an MRI Machine

A 32-year-old hospital visitor carrying an oxygen cylinder was killed after he walked into a room with an MRI machine still on.

The Guardian reported that Rajesh Maru was assured by hospital staff the machine was turned off before he walked into the room. It wasn't — and the magnetic force of the machine yanked both him and the cylinder toward it as soon as he entered the room. The oxygen cylinder was reportedly damaged, and Maru died as a result of inhaling a lethal amount of oxygen released by the cylinder.

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